The long awaited Universal Binary of Office will be awaited a while longer, …

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David Flynn, at APC, has an interesting interview with Mary Starman, group manager for the MacBu. The good news is that the next version of Mac Office has completed the transition to Xcode.

"This was a huge milestone for us" Starman says with equal parts pride and relief. "We had to move from the CodeWare compiler, we were dealing with millions of lines of code and we still had old code that was written in Assembly, so it’s been a long process to switch everything over and for our developers to learn the new tools. Everyone has been working very hard on the transition, it’s been literally all hands on deck".

The bad news is the projected release date for Mac Office.

"Typically we release about 6-8 months after Windows Office, and they've announced general availability in the January timeframe, so we would be 6-8 months after that."

That would see Mac Office 2007 being released approximately a year from now, roughly two years after the announcement of the transition to Intel, and a year after the last Mac model, the Mac Pro, will have made the transition. Hopes that Roz Ho and Bruce Chizen, of Microsoft and Adobe respectively, will be doing a "come to Steven" walk-on at the Macworld 2007 Keynote, UB copies of the most important 3rd party titles for the Mac in hand, appear to be dashed. As it stands now, it could be Macworld 2007 Beta with Apple having Leopard nearly complete, Adobe doing a carefully constructed demo, and Microsoft showing some PowerPoint slides (done with Windows Office 2007).

However, those slides could be interesting because Mac Office 2007 will apparently be having a UI facelift, though the most touted UI change in Windows Office 2007 may not be making the move.

We can get some ideas (from the ribbon) but it still has to fit within Apple’s UI guideline, that’s what a Mac user wants to see" Starman says.

I, for one, hope this means that the screen-devouring ribbon will be left in the Windows version of Office, along with the ghost of Clippy and other bad UI ideas. On a positive porting note, XML will be a file format option for Mac Office 2007. Still, having to wait another year for Mac Office is difficult to accept, but it's not like Office users have much choice. Of course, if iWork 07 adds a spreadsheet and fills out its feature set, that might change.